Greg Kroah-Hartman recently posted a neat tip on Google+ that newer versions of dmesg support a --human option.

The dmesg command is in the sys-apps/util-linux package. The stable version, at time of writing, is sys-apps/util-linux-2.22.2. The newest versions of sys-apps/util-linux depend on a newer (masked) version of sys-apps/sysvinit, so I'll walk you through this as well. These instructions only apply for amd64; I have no means to experiment with other platforms.

First - make a backup of both packages. This is pretty easy.

Code:

quickpkg util-linux
quickpkg sysvinit

If something in all this goes wrong, you might have some difficulty booting your box, but once you do you can reinstall the old version easily with a command such as: